For nearly a half-century, Bryan Soronson has been absolutely nuts about ice cream, one spoonful at a time. And he’s always ready to dish.
An Owings Mills resident and retired senior administrator of the neurology department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Soronson says he has sampled “well over 1,000” flavors at ice cream stores, parlors, creameries and gelaterias on nearly every continent.
In his zeal for the chilly stuff, Soronson always carries around a gold-plated tasting spoon, and he’s taught ice cream courses to Baltimore County students.
A native of Buffalo, New York, the ice cream connosieur moved to the Baltimore area in 1978 and has been happily and methodically mapping the region’s frozen dessert scene, dairy by dairy, ever since.
In honor of the July 19th observance of “National Ice Cream Day,” Jmore recently sat down with Soronson, 72, to get the scoop on the sweet and eternal allure of ice cream, about what separates gelato and frozen custard from ice cream, and why he’s a “texture person” who adamantly refuses toppings or eating green mint chip.
How did you first become obsessed with ice cream?
It started with my father. He was a Jewish salesman in Buffalo who drove around small towns finding good ice cream nobody else knew about, and he’d take the family along. That planted the seed.
But the moment that really opened my eyes came in 1978 when I was in graduate school in Albany and took a weekend trip to Boston. I walked into a parlor called Steve’s in Somerville and had real gourmet, high-fat ice cream for the first time in my life. There was always a line out the door. I still have the T-shirt.
That’s when I understood there was a whole tier of quality above anything I’d tasted before, and I started chasing it, first around Central Maryland, then everywhere I traveled for work.
What was Baltimore’s ice cream scene like when you first arrived here?
I moved here in 1978, and Lee’s, which started in Towson on York Road, was the best ice cream in Baltimore at the time. I had my 30th birthday party there. They eventually expanded to the Inner Harbor, Fells Point and a few other spots. Their chocolate raspberry chunk, made with the actual raspberry seeds still in it, was extraordinary.
I’m a texture person, and I like something to chew on. Lee’s is long gone now, but that flavor is still the standard I measure everything else against.
Your obsession clearly didn’t stop at the Maryland border. How did you track down the good stuff on the road?
I’d go to the public library, pull out a phone book and build a route. Five stops in San Francisco, eight in Manhattan. This was the ’80s and ’90s, well before the internet made that kind of research obsolete.
I’d talk to the owners about butterfat, air content, how they made it. A local food writer, Rob Kasper, wrote a ‘Happy Eater’ column in The Sun back then, and I once told him he’d left a few places off his list. We ended up comparing notes for a few more articles.
What’s the best ice cream in Baltimore today?
The Charmery, Taharka Brothers, Always Ice Cream, Bmore Licks in Federal Hill and Canton, and Scoop & Paddle, which is really Martha’s Cafe in Arbutus. Those are all what I’d call super-premium: 14 to 17 percent butterfat, only about 25 percent air. Taharka Brothers makes an incredible cherry chocolate chip, and their roasted strawberry and key lime are both worth seeking out.
What’s the difference between ice cream, gelato and everything else on the supermarket shelf?
It comes down to two things: butterfat and air. The FDA requires a minimum of 10 percent butterfat for something to legally be called ice cream at all — that’s your Turkey Hill, your Breyers — and those products can run close to 50 percent air, which the industry calls ‘overrun.’ Premium brands like Tillamook or Turkey Hill’s natural line move up to around 12 to 13 percent butterfat with a bit less air. Super premium — meaning Häagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry’s, Graeter’s and all of Baltimore’s artisanal makers — is 14 to 17 percent butterfat and only about 25 percent air.
Think of it like bread — Wonder Bread and an artisanal sourdough are technically both loaves of bread, but they’re not remotely the same product.
Gelato is a different animal entirely. It’s made with far less fat, usually five to eight percent, churned with very little air in specialized Italian machines, and served warmer, so the flavor hits you much more intensely.
And frozen custard has a legal minimum of 1.4 percent egg yolks, which is what gives it that dense, creamy texture. The egg acts as a natural emulsifier.
I’ll also tell you something that surprises people: many familiar supermarket brands don’t legally qualify as ice cream anymore. Look closely at the label. If the butterfat is under 10 percent, it has to say, ‘Frozen dairy dessert,’ and the print is often barely distinguishable from the background.
What about vegan ice cream?
Same rule, different reason. There’s technically no such thing as vegan ice cream. It’s often a wonderful product, made with coconut, almond or pea fat, and some brands get close to the fat content of real ice cream. But since there’s no milk fat involved, it can’t carry the ice cream name. You’ll see it on the shelf labeled a frozen dessert instead.
Any particular flavor from your travels that’s stayed with you?
A parlor called Pudú in northern Patagonia, in a [Chilean] town called Puerto Varas, made a passion fruit raspberry sorbet with all the seeds left in, big ones and little ones, sweet and tart at once. I still think about it.
On the gelato side, I had a cup in a café in Split, Croatia, that rivaled anything in Italy. In Japan, I found five different matcha flavors at a single shop, graded by intensity and priced accordingly, alongside wasabi and red bean.
Closer to home, I love the lavender at Scoop & Paddle.
You clearly don’t shy away from unique flavors.
One of my rules is, sample before you order, and don’t be afraid of the strange ones. Most people are too polite to ask for a sample, but that’s exactly how these parlors show you what they can really do.
I took my grandchildren, ages 7 and 10, into a Bethesda parlor a couple of weeks ago and told them we were doing a full tasting first. My 10-year-old ended up choosing green apple sorbet over every flavor with sprinkles in it. You never know until you taste.
What’s the biggest mistake you see people make at the counter?
They order with their eyes, not their tongue. They see something neon green or cherry red and assume that’s the real flavor, or they’re too rushed to ask for a taste first.
My rule for 30 years has been simple: sample before you commit, no matter how long the line is behind you. That one habit teaches you more about a parlor in 30 seconds than any menu board will.
You’ve also been vocal about what’s in commercial ice cream.
Stabilizers and emulsifiers, many derived from red seaweed or plant gums, have been in mass-market ice cream for decades, and for years I assumed they were harmless because they’re classified by the FDA as ‘generally regarded as safe.’
That category, it turns out, is more of a catch-all than a rigorous approval. [The sulfated polysaccharides] carrageenan has a poor reputation. I wrote to Ben & Jerry’s directly and asked why they still use it in a high-fat product that already has egg yolks as a natural stabilizer. They told me they consider it safe and necessary to their formulation. I still hope enough people ask the same question that it eventually disappears from the ingredient list.
And then there’s green mint chip, which might be my biggest pet peeve. Real mint is naturally white, or maybe barely off-white, not the green people expect. I once asked a New Jersey parlor why they dyed theirs, and they told me they’d tried selling both: the green sold out in three hours, the white took three days.
We’ve simply been trained to expect a color that has nothing to do with the actual flavor. The same goes for pistachio, which should be an off-white or pale brown, not the neon green you often see.
Any tips for the average ice cream eater at home?
Let it soften before you eat it. A few minutes out of the freezer releases far more flavor than eating it rock-hard.
I use an old-style Zeroll scoop from the 1930s, which has no mechanism at all; you just run it around the edges. And I’d encourage people to check the ‘grams per serving’ on the label, not just calories. A standard pint serving is about two-thirds of a cup, but the weight tells you how dense the product actually is. A basic supermarket brand might run 80 to 90 grams per serving; a super-premium pint can be 130 to 150 grams for the same size scoop, because it’s so much less air.
Finally, and this one’s just personal preference, I eat it plain. No toppings, no mix-ins added at the counter. If the ice cream is good, it doesn’t need anything else.
After so many decades, why are you still obsessed with ice cream?
Honestly, it’s still curiosity. Every parlor has a story, if you ask the person behind the counter, and I’ve never once regretted requesting a sample I wasn’t sure about. My favorite flavor these days changes with the season, but the habit doesn’t. I eat a full serving of real ice cream every single day, I walk an hour to make room for it, and I’ve never once talked myself into a store-brand tub when there was somewhere better 10 minutes up the road.
That’s really it: find the good stuff and taste it before you buy.
Ted Merwin is a Baltimore-based writer and the author of “Pastrami On Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli” (NYU Press).
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